Stories for "Clay Shirky"

Summer: the season for cracking open a good book under the shade of a tree. Below, we’ve compiled about 70 stellar book recommendations from members of the TED community. Warning: not all of these books can be classified as beach reads. And we think that is a good thing. Picks from Elizabeth Gilbert, author […]

By Liz Jacobs and Ben Lillie Taking stock of our moment in history helps us better understand ourselves, our societies and the present moment itself — which often gets lost in the temptation to look backwards or forwards. And at TED2014: The Next Chapter we’re doing plenty of both. But we’re also designating this All-Stars […]

The open-source programming world has a lot to teach democracy, says Clay Shirky. In this fascinating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Shirky harkens back to the early days of the printing press. At the time, a group of “natural philosophers” (who would later adopt the term “scientists”) called the Invisible College realized that the press could […]

Amy Cuddy must be proud: Clay Shirky walks on stage and promptly strikes a power pose. Then he tells us of a 9-year-old Scottish girl who lives about 50 miles from here. Martha Payne started the foodblog NeverSeconds, for which she took her camera into school to document her lunches, using metrics such as “pieces of hair found […]

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto — a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume. (Recorded at the TED offices, January 2012, in New York. Duration: 13:59) Watch Clay Shirky’s talk on […]

Today, several of our favorite websites are going dark or blacking out their homepages to raise awareness of two bills, in the US House and Senate, that threaten people’s ability to share on the web. In the past week, we’ve pondered what TED.com should be doing to help raise awareness of the PIPA and SOPA […]

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to […]

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. (Recorded at TED@State, at the US State Department, June 2009, in Washington, […]

Clay Shirky studies social networks, connections and subcultures that are using emerging technologies to connect. In Shirky’s prescient talk at TEDGlobal 2005 (given in the Era Before Facebook, if such a time can be imagined), he talks about how social media will allow for loose collaborative networks, where small contributors have big roles and fluid […]

TED is in Washington, DC, today, helping to throw a first-of-its-kind conference: TED@State, bringing great ideas from TEDTalks to Washington. This afternoon at the State Department, five TEDTalks stars — Clay Shirky, Paul Collier, Jacqueline Novogratz, Stewart Brand, and Hans Rosling — will share insight and new ideas; music will come from the legendary Zap […]

Via Slashdot, blogger Andrew Keen writes that economic troubles will trigger the decline of the “free” economy, collaboration, and open-source — including communities such as Wikipedia — and even, perhaps, the blogosphere itself. People will be less likely to give away “their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get […]

There’s a great talk from Clay Shirky in the latest issue of Edge — about all of our surplus, unused brain power, and what we might be able to do with it if we turn off our TVs: How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, […]

Four of the speakers that participated in the first TEDGLOBAL in Oxford (July 2005) have all published new books recently. Former Afghani minister and head of Kabul University Ashraf Ghani (watch his TEDtalk), together with Clare Lockhart, has penned “Fixing Failed States: A Framework For Rebuilding A Fractured World“. They discuss the “between forty and […]